Tawny-OWL 1.3

Less than one month after the release of Tawny-OWL 1.2.0 (n.d.a) I am pleased to announce the 1.3.0 release. This is a much smaller release than 1.2.0, but provides two useful changes.

First, I have now added support for axiom annotations as more extensively documented in my past post (n.d.b) While I expect these are still a minority requirement, they are used heavily by some people, and so they need supporting.

Second, I have reworked the support for patterns. This has been through the addition of three functions. p allows writing classes with optionality. So, for instance, consider this code:

(p o/owl-class
   o partition-name
   :comment comment
   :super super)

comment and super are optional here; they can be nil. In this case, the p function removes the nil value from the owl-class call. More over if, as in this case, the entire frame is has only nil values, it will be removed altogether. p returns the results of this call as a clojure record contain the entity itself and the name that was used to create that entity. In a nice piece of serendipity, the support that I have added for annotations (n.d.b) also allows direct use of this record latter in the pattern. So, for example, this form uses partition with is the return value from above.

(map
 #(p o/owl-class o
     %
     :comment comment
     :super partition)
   values)

The reason for this record, though, is that it makes it relatively easy to build patterns in both function and macro form. Macros are never trivial, but all this one does is turn a set of symbols into their string equivalents.

(defmacro defpartition
  "As value-partition but accepts symbols instead of string and
takes the ontology as a frame rather than first argument."
  [partition-name partition-values & options]
  (tawny.pattern/pattern-generator
   'tawny.pattern/value-partition
   (list* (name partition-name)
          `(tawny.util/quote-word ~@partition-values)
          options)))

The practical upshot of this is that I can define a value partition using a macro like this:

(defpartition Hydrophobicity
  [Hydrophobic Hydrophillic]
  :comment "Part of the Hydrophobicity value partition"
  :super PhysicoChemicalProperty
  :domain AminoAcid)

As well as generating the OWL API objects, this also binds the relevant vars, both those visible here (Hydrophobicity) and those generated (hasHydrophobicity).

Take together these are both important additions to Tawny-OWL. We can provide better provenance with the axiom annotations, and with patterns we can lift the level of abstraction at which we build our ontology which is one of the original motivations for Tawny-OWL in the first place.

Tawny-OWL 1.3.0 is now available on Clojars.